Good Times Brain Monitoring App Eliminates Distracting Phone Calls

Few things are worse than when you're in "the zone" at the office only to have your concentration shattered by a phone call. Good Times, however, is looking to change that by giving your smartphone the ability to block incoming calls when you are in deep though.

An experimental app we saw at AT&T's recent Innovation Showcase, Good Times uses NeuroSky's Mindwave Mobile brainwave monitor to determine your brain activity. That information is then relayed to a smartphone app that allows users to set their desired threshold for when Good Times can intervene and block phone calls using a simple slider at the top of the screen. Calls made to a phone running Good Times are sent to AT&T's Call Management servers to determine if they should go through.

During a demonstration of the system, developer Ruggero Scorcioni placed a call to a smartphone with Good Times installed, and set the threshold for concentration on the app to the lowest level, meaning no calls could get through. When we made a call to Scorcioni's smartphone, our call was automatically rerouted to a prerecorded message telling us that Scorcioni was unavailable.

While office workers may not be willing to walk around with a large contraption strapped to their heads, Scorcioni says the technology, which isn't yet commercially available, could be modified in the future to work with a system like Google's Project Glass.

A newspaper man at heart, Dan Howley wrote for Greater Media Newspapers before joining Laptopmag.com. He also served as a news editor with ALM Media’s Law Technology News, and he holds a B.A. in English from The Richard Stockton College of New Jersey.